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Comment by Liftyee | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious - how often do you use the scrollbar? For me, almost never (or only as an indication of progress through a document). I'm scrolling only with wheel or arrows or PgUp etc.

Perhaps though this is learned behaviour from scrollbars being tiny. I'd rather have the extra screen space. The scrollbar is usually a nuisance when I accidentally touch it (touchscreen) and the page jumps away.

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When reading a document in a browser, I rely on the scrollbar to know things like: how long is it? Where am I in the document? How much of the document is on my screen right now?

This is critical for decisions like: "Should I read the whole thing?" and for building a mental map of the whole document.

I use the scrollbar to scroll between parts of the document if I need to flick back and forth quickly, say between the data and the interpretation, once I have that mental map and know where things roughly are.

While reading, I'm dragging or wheeling.

Yeah, I could literally accept a non-clickable "scroll gauge" to be there all the time that will not be a click/drag target.

I can generate scroll events or use keys like HOME/PGUP/PGDN/END or even search forward/back via keyboard to jump around. And I also suffer when a slightly misplaced click causes a disorienting scroll instead of hitting some other interaction target near the window edge.

You can do interesting things in the scroll bar. Some coding editors (like Visual Studio) cram a lot of useful information into the scroll bar.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-tr...

For mouse users, clicking and dragging the scrollbar is the fastest and most intuitive way to scroll through a large document or list. (The scroll wheel, if you have one, is much slower.)

Until some dolt decides to build "infinite scroll" - I've seen dragging the scrollbar with the mouse cause JS exceptions to be thrown on some pages. One for the UI hall of shame.

I don't think I've seen a JS exception like that, but it drives me nuts when I'm dragging the scrollbar down for a quick scan of the page contents (especially if it's images or huge product tiles), and at some point it suddenly loads more in, scrolls down a chunk further before I can let go of the mouse button, and then I don't know where the hell I was.

For scrolling large distances in large documents, that's an important use case to me. As an indication of progress is another important use case, but also as an indication to show the size of the document relative to the viewport.

> I'm curious - how often do you use the scrollbar?

Almost every time. Scrolling with the mouse has bugs in Windows (focus on the active field) and fine grained scrolling is not possible with the mouse.

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